AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You see what I see?” Viking asks, and I nod because all the shop fronts are grimy, filthy really, with torn paper covering the windows, but although the doctor's office still looks a mess, it almost looks … cleaner. The newspaper over the windows is newer, less discoloured and torn.
Texting the group, I pull my gun as Viking does the same, and we head towards the door.
“See that?” I nod to the camera above the door. Viking nods.
I text the group again. The door’s locked. I check the door to the pharmacy next door, and it’s open. The guys text back to wait. and we’ll all go in together, so we drop a pin and wait. It's only five minutes or so till they all arrive, and Steel kicks the door in as we all take cover; as fuck knows what we're gonna find in there.
We split up and search every room. There's clear evidence someone’s been here more recently than anywhere else in this shit hole of a town but nothing that says Ray was even here. Dice pulls his phone out and starts typing. We clear the place, and just before we make a move to leave, Dice stops us. “Here, on the floor plans. This place has a basement.”
“Fuck. Everyone, search again, search the floors, walls for secret doors, fucking anything. Take this place apart if we have to!” Ares barks as we all scatter again.
“Here!” I yell. “There's a push panel under the stairs in the back of the cupboard.” Pushing the panel, the door springs forward, and the smell that hits makes me gag. “Fuck… it smells like something’s died down there!”
“We can't all go in. Guys, form a perimeter around the building, heads on a swivel in case they are watching the cameras. Steel, stay here with Dice. I’m going in alone.”
“Wait, I need to go. I need to see!” Steel gasps.
“Just let me check it first, okay?” Ares nods to him, and his shoulders sag, but he nods back. We all turn and exit the building, leaving Ares to go in and Dice and Steel waiting by the door. I step into the fresh air. I take my first real breath since finding the door.
Ares
I pull my shirt up over my face as Tank wasn't wrong when he said it smelt like someone had died here.
I use the light on my phone, but as I step to the top of the stairs, there’s a light switch. Maybe if they’ve been using this space, there will be electricity, so I flick the switch, and the lights flicker on with an amber glow, filling the room from the fluorescent bulbs. I gasp. It’s a dirtier version of Ray’s kill room. The room itself is filthy, to say the least. There's a table like you'd find in the morgue with leather straps attached to it. It's got dried blood, among other things, on it. I mean, a lot of blood and stuff. It's disgusting. There’s a table at the side of it with tools, knives, and scalpels, some clearly new, others rusty but all bloodied.
There's a wall full of screens. Ray said she’d heard and watched everything, and in front of it is a high-back chair with leather straps on it, too. It looks like she was strapped into the chair and made to watch everything. There's a small table at the side with some clamps. They look like the sort that keep your eyes open. Looks like she couldn't even close her eyes to get away from everything. There's blood, and shit literally everywhere. It doesn't look like there was anywhere clean or anywhere for her to sleep.
I take a deep breath and regret it immediately. It smells like death in here. There's a wall with photos pinned to it, and as I look over them, they're of us. Someone’s been following us for months, maybe longer. There's another wall that just has photos of Ray, and the ones that have other people in their faces are scratched out over and over again.
Someone clearly had an obsession with Ray. “You can come down!” I say as I close my eyes and take another breath that I immediately regret again.
As Steel and Dice reach the bottom of the steps, they say, “Fucking hell!”
Dice gags, but Steel pushes forward straight to the wall with Ray’s pictures and runs his fingers over them, “She looked so happy here. With me, with us all.” He caresses every photo as if it's her, here in person.
“She was.” I remind him that she was made for our club and us, and I'm regretful of the part I took in pushing her away. I miss my sister, the bane of my existence, as she was down in my phone, but I miss her terribly. How the fuck are any of us gonna be the same again without her? Especially Steel, he's riding on a death wish, and that's never gonna end well.
“Don't move anything yet. Let me just take some photos. We can check the finer details at home.” We take a step back to the bottom of the stairs while Dice takes pictures of everything, even the blank floor and wall space. He takes close-ups of all the leather straps, and then he pulls a load of plastic bags from his rucksack. “I need to collect everything up. We’re taking as much as we can carry.” Dice informs us. “Steel?” Dice hands him some bags. “Can you check those filing cabinets over there? Bag anything up you can find and label which drawer they came from.” He hands him a Sharpie.
“Ares, can you help me remove these straps? I've got a guy who can run DNA on them and see who else touched them. Put these on.” He hands us both some latex gloves, and we get to work.
We take everything down off the walls and bag it. That's when Dice finds the camera. It's tiny, it's so small that if you didn't know what you were looking for, you'd miss it. “The sick fuck was recording everything they did to her, watching her every move!”
“Can you find the footage?” It's a long shot, I know, but if we can catch a glimpse of Dante, we will know who we’re looking for.
Dice takes the camera off the wall and follows the cable across the room. It's tucked right into the corner of the wall. The mortar has been ground out and replaced with new over the top of the cable, and as Dice gently tugs, it goes into the wall behind a brick. Dice takes a knife out and slides it into the mortar surrounding the brick, and gently teases it till he can remove the brick. There's a black box connected to the end of the cable.
“I need to get this back to my laptop.”
“Do we need anything else?” Dice takes one more look around the room, shakes his head, and we leave with all the bags we've collected. Dice puts what he can into his backpack, but the rest we hand out between us, securing them under our jackets, and we head home.
Pulling up outside the clubhouse, Dice collects all the bags. I think I should go through these on my own first and tomorrow, we can go through what we've found.
“I'm coming!” These are the first words out of Steel’s mouth. He's been expressionless since we entered that basement, and even now, it's like he's not really here.
“No!” I shake my head. “I’ll go with Dice, but you're not watching any footage that we haven't vetted. There are certain things, Brother, that you won't recover from, so let us check it all first, and we can show you what we can tomorrow.”
Steel sighs. “Ares!”
